Forecasts of U.S. short-term interest rates: a flexible forecast combination approach

Abstract

This paper develops a flexible approach to combine forecasts of future spot rates with forecasts from time-series models or macroeconomic variables. We find empirical evidence that accounting for both regimes in interest rate dynamics and combining forecasts from different models helps improve the out-of-sample forecasting performance for US short-term rates. Imposing restrictions from the expectations hypothesis on the forecasting model are found to help at long forecasting horizons.Interest rates ; Forecasting